


Good Omens - Horsemen Introductions

by WhiskeyCash



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Action/Adventure, Apocalypse, Biblical Themes (Abrahamic Religions), Character Introduction, Four Horsemen, Horror, No Sex, Suspense, revised script
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 15:28:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21412447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhiskeyCash/pseuds/WhiskeyCash
Summary: I don't want to waste your time: There's no sex in this thing. Also no Crowley or Aziraphale.My own introductory scenes for three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. TV-formulaic action.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	Good Omens - Horsemen Introductions

**Author's Note:**

> I watched the Good Omens TV adaptation and thought it was pretty alright. But one thing that bugged me was the introductory scenes for the Horsemen. There was a buildup for them being these terrifying deities, but I felt like their introductions didn't match their power. Pollution, especially, felt like a completely missed opportunity for a very fun scene. I never read the book and I know the TV show blew through their budget before the last episode, so take this with a grain of salt.  
I wrote my own introductory scenes for three of the Horsemen, which I guess would occur before their actual scenes of receiving their summons from the messenger. Didn't do Death. Had them kicking around for a while so figured I'd post them. Hope you enjoy.  
(For the sake of literary convenience, Pollution is referred to as a female entity)

**I.**

* * *

A small fishing trawler is out at sea at sundown off the coast of Wales. It’s operated by a seasoned Captain and his two sailors. The mechanical wench swings over the deck and the net unloads to reveal little more than seaweed and a few juvenile mackerel. 

“Captain!” one of the sailors shouts against the sea winds, “We’ve been out for hours and we haven’t caught anything!"

“It’s late, Captain,” the other chimes in, “Let’s head back.”

“No!” the Captain leers at the tangle of seaweed, brows furrowed, “We don’t return empty.” He stomps to the helm, frustrated, and sails the ship further out as he grabs the intercom, “This is the S.S. Tarshish, we’re sailing to deeper waters, over.” 

“Rodger, Tarshish,” a voice over the radio crackles back.

The Captain returns the intercom to its holster and breathes to himself. “Where the hell have the fish gone…”

After finding a fresh patch of ocean to trawl, the net is dragged again and the wench rises. It’s got something, and it’s heavy. The sailors anxiously bring the wench to the deck and release the load. Out spills a heaping ton of garbage: plastic, aluminum and mesh gripping strangled fish. The Captain loses his temper, kicking at the garbage as the sailors turn in awe to the sea. The Captain eventually takes notice to what’s caught their attention and joins them gaping at the railing. The ocean is positively teaming with garbage, oil, and dead fish. 

“Captain!” the sailors shout and point to something even stranger.

There among the waste on a piece of flotsam is a young woman in a white dress. The crew rush to bring her on board. She’s unresponsive but alive. They lay her down in the bunkroom and the Captain instructs the sailors to radio to shore of the pollutant spill and call an ambulance for the woman. 

Captain fumbles to make sense of it all, glimpsing anxiously at an adjacent photo of himself standing with his wife and three children. Garbage in the seas, toxified wildlife, shipwrecked sailors… this isn’t the world he wants for his family. 

He rubs his hand over the stubble around his mouth, “What’s going on…?”

“The end of days.”

The Captain leaps, spinning to see the woman now awake and standing, staring at him blankly. She’s ambiguous in age and gender. Her ashen hair matches her sundress, and her eyes are pale and inhuman. There’s something especially eerie about this woman, but the Captain questions his dubiousness and swallows a dry lump in his throat.

“Miss, w-what happened?”

The woman takes a step towards the Captain, who moves backwards a little on instinct. “The other shoe has dropped, Captain.” A pang of dread surges when she addresses him. “You may blame me for it, but it’s you who’ve brought it upon yourselves. I am but… mankind’s creation.”

“What, what are you talking about?” the Captain’s fear rises with every second.

She takes another step towards him. “1986, the Chernobyl Disaster—a reactor fails in a nuclear power plant, flooding the locale in radiation for a hundred years to come…” She takes another step. “2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill—200 million gallons of oil pumped into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days, it’s still being cleaned up today.” Another step and his back is against the wall. “2019… trash island—600,000 square miles of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean, and still growing…”

The Captain’s heart pounds inside of him. Who is this woman? Her face remains emotionless, eyes unblinking as she cocks her head left to right as if trying to gauge his thoughts. He gingerly scoots his hand behind his back, fingers dancing along the hilt of a hidden pistol.

“You accuse me for what you’ve done to yourselves,” she continues, brows creasing just enough to hint at puzzlement, “There was a time in mankind’s history where he thwarted pestilence with medicine. Little did he know without something to challenge him, he would become his own enemy… Captain.”

The Captain feels another jolt of panic and trusts his instincts. He draws his pistol and fires. The bullet sinks just below the woman’s sternum but she seems indifferent to it. In lieu of blood, from the wounds out pours inky raw oil. 

“What… what are you?”

Her face lifts into a grin, and garbage-juice sludge drips from her mouth, then eyes and nose and fingertips. The Captain bolts from the bunkroom to the deck. Night has fallen upon them and the sea winds are whipping the waves choppy. He trips over something and lands hard, spinning around to see the mangled bodies of his sailors. He only spares a quick glance but they seem to be slicked in oil, choked on plastic bags and stuffed with garbage. The Captain bounds up to the helm and dives for the intercom. 

“Breaker, breaker! This is the S.S. Tarshish, we’ve got an emergency!”

A voice on the other end responds but before anything else can happen, the intercom starts to ooze with sludge and the Captain drops it, panicked. 

“It’s too late…”

The Captain spins to see the woman standing before him, almost looking at him with pity with those piercing unblinking eyes. A wave sloshes against the boat and the Captain braces himself against the grating to regain his balance.

“What did you do? What did you do?!” he shouts, pointing his gun again despite knowing it’s useless.

“Have you been listening?” she moves towards him.

Still, he fires the last of his bullets. Some zip right past her, another ricochets off the ship and a few more lodge into her body, only to usher more oozing oil. He pulls the trigger again and again but the clip’s empty. She gently places her hand over the gun and pushes it down, letting it fall from his limp grip. His heart races, sweat pours down his face, the ship rocks against the sea.

She moves in impossibly closer to whisper to him, to all of humanity, “You’ve done this to yourselves.”

She pulls away with that same emotionless gaze. The Captain is paralyzed. For a moment, there’s a vortex of silence amid the winds. Another vexed wave smacks the side of the ship. The Captain tips over the railing and plunges into the ocean. Garbage swarms all around him, blocking his way back to the surface. He paddles upward franticly against the plastic bags and mesh and rotting fish, netting and wire tangling around his legs. The harsh searchlight of the ship above grows dimmer as the trash clouds his path to air. He can just barely make out the silhouette of the woman standing on the deck watching him indifferently as he drowns.

**II.**

* * *

It’s recess at a kindergarten somewhere in Missouri, USA. Happy healthy kids play under the sunshine drinking up the day’s splendor without a care in the world. A square-headed boy and his friend jog to a girl on the swing and demands their turn. The girl isn’t done swinging yet but the boy is impatient. He pushes her off the swing into the sandbox. She stumbles away with globs of tears in her eyes, right up to a long-legged substitute monitoring the playground. Her fiery hair is pulled up in a bun tight to match her tensed lips that look as though she’s always fighting a smug grin. The little girl blubbers to the substitute about the boy pushing her. 

“Oh, sweetie,” the substitute crouches to the little girl’s eye-level and wipes a tear away with her thumb, “You can’t let people push you around… You gotta push back.”

The substitute’s eyes flash excitedly, lips almost surrendering to a smile as the little girl trots off drying her eyes on the hem of her sleeve. The girl walks up to the boy on the swing, who tells her off. With newfound assurance, the little girl shoves the boy off the swing so hard, he lands mouth-first on the curb and knocks a tooth out. Shocked, the boy’s friend grabs an adjacent plastic pale and throws it at the little girl. It hits her right in the head and she goes down as the boy with the broken tooth holds his bleeding mouth. The little girl’s friend sees this, and jogs in to tackle the boy. Just like that, the playground erupts into chaos as the kids fight one another, most ignorant to how it all even started. 

Recess at kindergarten turns into a miniature battlefield of child-on-child warfare. Balls knocking teeth out, kids dragged from red wagons face-down across the asphalt, necks wringed by jump-rope, sand poured down throats… One kid doubles back to the classroom and pries the lid of the hamster cage open. He grabs the poor thing and pitches it against the window with a primal roar, then smears the hamster’s blood down his pudgy face. The substitute’s lips finally curl into a calculating grin as she drinks up the sights. A pointed laugh slips out when she sees a child held down as another repeatedly runs her over on a tricycle.

“Dear god!” a teacher emerges from the building and leaps in to intervene, “Stop that! What are you doing? No, stop! STOP!”

Another few teachers take notice to the commotion and make it outside, sprinting in to yank the savage kids from one another. But all of this only makes the substitute laugh harder.

“What the H-E-L-L happened?” another teacher wheezes to her as he pulls out his phone to call 9-1-1.

“Well…” her chuckle subsides and she sighs warmly at the battleground, “Kids will be kids.”

The teacher stares at her, stunned, half paying attention to the ringing line. “W-what agency did you say you were hired from?”

She turns to look at him, and for one reason or another he feels a pang of dread upon her eye-contact. “Ohh… don’t you worry about that…” Her gaze falls back to the teachers scrambling to break up the kids. “Just enjoy the show… It’s all quite ordinary, I assure you,” she adds in response to his shock. On the playground, a kid smashes a wiffle-ball bat against another kid’s head. “You, humans, are innately violent… as demonstrated,” she fans her hand to the playground, “All it takes is the smallest push and people will devolve to their most primitive instincts. Completely natural.” She casts him a sideways wink over a smug grin. “These children will grow up to bring assault rifles to their high schools… and later, as military officers, they’ll launch missiles in the name of peace.” She takes a steep inhale, savoring the smell of fresh blood on blacktop. “God bless America.”

The teacher can only stare dumbfounded at this monster of a woman, questioning everything he’s known about children and the education system. His call finally goes through but he’s speechless with shock.

“Hello, 9-1-1 what’s your emergency?” the operator’s voice muffles from the receiver, “Hello…? Hello, are you in danger? Hello…?”

**III.**

* * *

It’s another heated afternoon in slums somewhere in war-torn Syria. Sitting in the shade of a crumbled brick building is a line of homeless locals. They’re all dirty and sickly, worn skin hanging loosely off sharp bones, and clothes as beaten as their humanity. One boy is particularly skinny, acrid lips shrunken to expose his discolored gums. He can’t be more than nine, but he doesn’t seem to have any family in sight. He holds his knees to his chest and attempts to wet his mouth against the beating heat of the desert.

A heavy tank blows past the beggars, followed by several armed trucks and foot soldiers all sporting insignias of the American flag. As the vehicles kick up a skirt of dust along the dirt roads, a young soldier’s gaze darts along the beggars with pity. His eyes fall upon the skeletal boy, and he pulls away from his troop. The soldier leans down to the boy and offers him a chrome package of rations. The boy barely has enough energy to lift his head to meet the soldier’s sympathetic gaze. His eyes are blue—alien to the earthy hues that have surrounded the boy his whole life.

“What are you doing, private?” The soldier’s commanding officer grabs his shoulder sternly, “Don’t waste your supplies on the locals. Now get back in formation, private.”

The soldier reluctantly lets himself be dragged away by his officer, and the boy’s gaze droops again. The last of the American soldiers pass the beggars’ row leaving a swirling cloud of dust in their wake. The boy’s eyelids grow heavy. But another sound reclaims his focus. 

“Hungry?”

Stooped before the boy, standing out brilliantly from the surroundings in a perfectly tailored purple suit is a man. He’s tall and thin, eyes a deep brown and teeth tawny. He holds a chocolate bar out for the boy. It’s Hershey brand—a delicacy so luxurious, the boy never dared to dream he would ever taste it. Must be too good to be true, and there’s something especially eerie about this man. Despite the dirt and grime that surrounds them, the man doesn’t have so much as a speck of dust on him. And though he smiles warmly, his eyes remain glazed and hollow.

When the boy doesn’t take the candy, the man pulls back and speaks up. 

“I’ve just arrived from the United States,” his voice is slow and sweet, like dripping honey, “You wouldn’t believe how things are there. Here, you’d be lucky to find just one meal a day… but over in America…” He flashes another bemused smile. “There’s such abundance, 150,000 tons of food is thrown away every day. Why, you wonder?” He chuckles. “They all want to be as skinny as you, dear boy!” Whether the boy understands or not, he listens quietly and lets the man continue. “But despite your misfortune for having been born here, and not America, you can have one taste of luxury… if you dare to.”

The man holds out the chocolate bar once more. The sun bakes down on the slums but the candy looks chilled and crisp. With the last bit of strength the boy can muster, he lifts his hand to the chocolate as the man continues to smile. 

The boy’s fingers graze the wrapping, and the chocolate dissolves to sand in the wind. The man has vanished but his laugh echoes disembodied, cruelly. The boy’s hand falls and he tucks his chin to his chest, finally closing his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I. Pollution  
II. War  
III. Famine


End file.
